Isn’t it fucking crazy that “industry demands ____” is likely to come to fruition, but “group of individuals demands XYZ” isn’t likely to change shit?
I demand better living conditions. We all demand an economy that doesn’t favor the rich. Not shit will change.
Companies “demand” shit and then just literally write the laws and hand them to legislators who pass them.
Companies “demand” shit and then just literally write the laws and hand them to legislators who pass them.
Well, Congress only hears one side, they don’t read Lemmy to get the other side.
They have no respect for their constituency, because they think their constituency doesn’t care enough to engage them about it, and are ‘dumb’ enough to vote them back in the office again.
There was a study recently that showed legislators’ votes are affected by like .3% by input from constituents. I’ll try to find it again, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
There was a study recently that showed legislators’ votes are affected by like .3% by input from constituents. I’ll try to find it again, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
I’ve seen it (there’s always one person who shares the link whenever I make this kind of argument), but that study doesn’t take into account what would happen if a large percentage of the electorate that actually participated in the system were to start communicating with their elected legislators.
Right now there is so little interaction done by the electorate with their representatives.
I guarantee you that if a large amount of the voting electorate all started contacting their senators and house reps often, on different various issues, things would matter/change.
So my point still stands.
If you just sit at home reading Lemmy, they’re not going to take you seriously, and they’re not going to look out for your best interests, but instead they’re going to look out for their own best interests, which is usually getting money from corporations that they use to win elections, because they know they can still get re-elected even when they disrespect their electorate.
Fundamentally, they do what they do because they can get away with it, they are not policed by their voters.
TL;DR: If you don’t engage, nothing will change.
But during the trump years, those figures spiked big time. Especially with services like resistbot. The amount of form letters and shitty Republican legislators using my contact as some sort of consent on my part to join their fucking mailing lists?
Not to mention, these legislators are insulated from their constituents pretty effectively. If you do manage to get someone on the phone (I never did. Ever.), it’ll be an aide that might summarize the general tone of the calls and e-mails in a couple seconds worth of walk n’ talk. I mean…the system is rigged for people with money.
I get the feeling of wanting to change that. But I don’t think the system that has been further and further adulterated to those ends will ever just hand us the tools to upend that system. It was built this way.
I mean, how many times and how many ways do they have to display their wholehearted willingness to watch us all starve and slaughter countless of us in service of capitalism? They’ve made it abundantly clear.
But during the trump years, those figures spiked big time.
[Citation required.] [And define ‘big time’.]
Not to mention, these legislators are insulated from their constituents pretty effectively.
No, they are not. You can contact them directly.
But moreso, they are not policed. If they started losing elections because the electorate actually participated in the system, with more than just sometimes voting, that would change. It truly comes back to them being able to get away with doing their jobs poorly because they are not held responsible for their (bad) work.
But I don’t think the system that has been further and further adulterated to those ends will ever just hand us the tools to upend that system.
The whole point of my argument is that we have those tools today, we’re just too lazy/not-caring to use them.
Umm…have you ever tried contacting your representatives? You seem to think it’s so easy to get them on the phone. Why. How can you possibly think that? Those numbers don’t ring in their pockets. Their aides are the only people receiving and sorting through those calls and emails and letters.
There are a great many ways to petition the government, including with actual petitions, but, short of showing up in person, the one reputed to be the most effective is picking up the phone and calling your congressional representatives. In the weeks following the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump, so many people started doing so that, in short order, voice mail filled up and landlines began blurting out busy signals. Pretty soon, even e-mails were bouncing back, with the information that the target in-box was full and the suggestion that senders “contact the recipient directly.” That being impractical, motivated constituents turned to other means. The thwarted and outraged took to Facebook or Twitter or the streets. The thwarted and determined dug up direct contact information for specific congressional staffers. The thwarted and clever remembered that it was still possible, several technological generations later, to send faxes; one Republican senator received, from a single Web-based faxing service, seven thousand two hundred and seventy-six of them in twenty-four hours. The thwarted and creative phoned up a local pizza joint, ordered a pie, and had it delivered, with a side of political opinion, to the Senate.
Americans vote, if we vote at all, roughly once every two years. But even in a slow season, when no one is resorting to faxes or protests or pizza-grams, we participate in the political life of our nation vastly more often by reaching out to our members of Congress. When we do so, however, we almost never get to speak to them directly. Instead, we wind up dealing with one of the thousands of people, many of them too young to rent a car, who collectively constitute the customer-service workforce of democracy.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/what-calling-congress-achieves
That doesn’t offer cold data, but it’s a pretty well known fact that this was an explosion of sudden political participation. And I don’t remember things going particularly well. Do you.
Umm…have you ever tried contacting your representatives?
I did it just a few days ago, actually.
You seem to think it’s so easy to get them on the phone.
You contact them, not call them. I never said call, I said contact.
Let them know you’re watching, let them know your opinions on issues, let them know you’re engaged, and you’re not just mindless cattle that they can manipulate in whatever way they want. If we all do it, if they feel the ‘Eye of Sauron’ on them, they act differently.
All you have to do is use one of their online email forms. They even respond back, letting you know they registered your email on what subject you’re talking about. They track this stuff internally.
From the article that you linked…
Unlike call volume, the data on mail sent to Congress is public, and it suggests that, at least among the politically active, the U.S. Postal Service remains popular; the Senate alone received more than 6.4 million letters last year. Contrary to popular opinion, those written communications are an effective way of communicating with Congress, >>>as are their electronic kin<<<. “Everything is read, every call and voice mail is listened to,” Isaiah Akin, the deputy legislative director for Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden, told me. “We don’t discriminate when it comes to phone versus e-mail versus letter.
So, even in the article you linked, even the aides of Representatives state that contacting them is effective in making them aware that they’re being seen by their constituency.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/what-calling-congress-achieves
There’s a volume/ratio problem of citizens to a single representative, so of course theyir aides are going to triage the calls coming in.
If you have a serious problem, some legal or administrative issue with the government, you actually are able to get elevated past the aides and talk to your actual representative. That happens all the time to citizens here.
But again, what I’m advocating is contacting them, you don’t call, you email (which is actually easier for us citizens to do anyways). They usually even have a link on their website where you can just web email them directly.
Their aides are the only people receiving and sorting through those calls and emails and letters.
And what, the aides never talk to their senators or their representatives? They never track why people are calling? B.S., they do both.
You’re not being intellectually honest. No one ever said you get personal one-on-one meetings whenever you want, and it’s weird how you’re purposely trying to motivate people not to engage in the political system they live in. Almost like you have an agenda/motives of your own.
Edit: Have you actually read through that whole article you linked? It really makes my point.
This is just two of the many examples that the article documents…
On January 2nd, House Republicans voted in secret to defang the Office of Congressional Ethics; less than twenty-four hours later, following what seemed at the time like a deluge of calls but later turned out to be just that loud patter you hear on your window before the storm really begins, they reversed their decision.
On January 24th, Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, introduced a proposal to sell off 3.3 million acres of federal land. Barely a week later, on February 1st, he withdrew it, after getting an earful. “Groups I support and care about fear it sends the wrong message,” he explained. “I hear you and H.R. 621 dies tomorrow.”
Cool. Now all of Google Drive is blocked because one guy hosted a movie there for a few days.
All it would take is someone getting AWS blacklisted for an hour, that law would disappear like it never existed.
Piracy Shield blocked a Cloudflare IP address recently too
Service Provider
Not Service Regulator
They shouldn’t have any knowledge of what websites people visit
Hmmm, yes. Build a whole generation of tech savvy people with knowledge of VPNs and that activelly hate your guts. I cannot foresee any way this could backfire.
Basically demands lawmakers for ISPs implement censorship tools.
Tor Tor Tor Tor Tor that’s the way the vpn goes.
(In the cadence of the thong song)
Tor is a fed honey pot
While TOR does accept funds from the U.S. federal government it is not a honey pot. Given tor is free and open source it is easy to verify the security of the software.
I use fedora btw (use open source software you fools)
If no one has told you yet. The feds busted a child porn network in the UK that used for because they were hosting over 65% of the exit nodes at the time. If your open source anonymous VPN is hosted by the feds, they can 100% see where the traffic is coming and where it’s going
Please link to a story substantiating this. What I have heard of happening repeatedly is that they trick criminals into communicating outside of tor, running an executable, or just take over the endpoint and nail people eg take over dark web drug markets and use information to track down the folks using it.
As the article notes, it’s hard to tell just how much of the unmasking comes from exit node control. An exit node will only know what public services are being accessed, without knowledge of any of the user’s addressing/location data (since each node only knows that information about the single hop in each direction). Plus, I’m not even sure exit nodes are used at all when connecting to a tor-hosted service (no need to exit the tor network, after all).
It sounds like the servers are being compromised and then being used to exploit IP-leaking vulnerabilities in how the browser/plugins and Tor network connection are configured.
I’m sure they’ve got a lot of tricks up their sleeves, but exit node control seems like the least significant of them.
Hahahahaha
Unintended consequences - what are they going to do once 90% of connections are encrypted, include use of VPNs and encrypted DNS?
This is what they’re promoting.
Host your own encrypted DNS on a VPS in a non-compliant location, use a VPN to connect to it.
So many ways these idiots are cutting their own throats.
Also, let’s list the companies rather than say “Movie Industry”. Or let that be a link to a Wiki article listing all the companies and their holdings.
Fuck em all at this point. I go to maybe 2 movies a year, at most. And I’m cutting subscription services, down to 2 at this point.
As a guy from Russia, I must admit that vpns are not a big problem for censors. They can be easily blocked, including self-hosted ones by protocol detection. And DNS would not do much with IP and clienthello-based blocks. And most users are not enough tech-savvy to constantly switch to new protocols as old ones get blocked.
You have no rights in Russia.
VPNs can’t be categorically banned in the US without major first amendment issues. It’s not a huge technical issue, but unless the courts just throw out the Constitution (a risk that we’re seeing too much of, but still a meaningful bar to cross), there are huge legal barriers to doing so.
Your government doesn’t need to care about legal barriers because you have a dictator who can act unilaterally.
You realize the tik tok ban bill is also going to ban the use of VPN’s right?
VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow “rules”. I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.
